Vintage Cops & Crooks

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James Gaffney was arrested yesterday for the larceny of a tub of butter valued at $10, the property of Mr. George Plummer.

— Boston Post, June 4, 1875

The alleged butter heist was part of a list of “Criminal Matters” reported by the Boston newspaper. The crimes, all thefts of various kinds, ranged from Frenchman Henry Mauthe’s forgery of a $650 note that he sold to another man for $519, with the second man then selling it to a third man for $620, to James’s comparatively modest theft of Mr. Plummer’s butter.

James must have been desperate to steal butter, or perhaps it was a crime of opportunity. Given its value — $10 — it would have been quite a large quantity of butter. It’s likely he intended to sell it and pocket the cash.

Three years later a man named James Gaffney was arrested for a brass knuckle assault on Richard Dailey in Lynn, Massachusetts. The assault occurred while James was out on bail for breaking and entering a Sagamore Street saloon. The assault charges were dropped after Richard refused to testify and told the court he had no memory of the attack.

These crimes all occurred in or near Boston, but it’s impossible to know whether the same James Gaffney was responsible for all of them.

The mugshot photo of James is a tintype — a photo made on a thin metal plate. That’s surprising because most police departments had switched to carte de visite — albumen prints on paper — for their rogues’ galleries by the 1870s, if not earlier. The tintype is in a paper sleeve with James’s name and information about his crime — “larceny of money from a dwelling house” — faintly written in pencil on the back. He’s a thin young man, about 20 years old, with blue eyes, large hands and a steely stare.

The tintype of James was paired by an eBay seller with a tintype of a man named Gorman, identified as a “Salem thief” on the front of the photo sleeve. Salem is a city north of Boston that was made famous by its 17th century witch trials. Nothing is written on the back of the photo sleeve and no information about the single-named Gorman was located. Both Gorman (assuming it was his last name) and Gaffney are Irish surnames and there were plenty of poor Irish immigrants in living in Massachusetts in the nineteenth century.

A small pair of rogues’ gallery tintypes is what remains — evidence of past misdeeds and misfortunes.

Featured photo: rogues’ gallery tintype of James Gaffney, circa 1870s. Collection of the author.